I guess you could call it a BOT revolution. The name of the BOT is called “boothoven[bot].” The software for it was written by Alain Gilbert, Jason, Michael Frick, and David Haslem.

What does the boothoven[bot] bot do? It automates a whole lot of turntable.fm COAK processes. Among them:

—Boothoven keeps a list of the room’s most popular selections (eg, the number of “awesomes” and “lames”). So when there is only one DJ on the deck (which normally causes the room to go silent), boothoven starts playing tunes.

—Boothoven automatically boots trolls who come into the room and try to play pieces in other genres (eg, dubstep). I’ve seen boothoven do this with amazing speed, far faster than I could do it (and I consider myself an excellent troll booter).

—Boothoven feeds links to the chat line on command. These include links to the room rules, the room Facebook page, and a list of emoticons that chatters can deploy.

The code runs via node.js—a JavaScript software system for writing applications on the Net. A number of services offer free hosting for the system.

Here are all the listed chat commands:

/skip – Skip my current song

/bop – ‘Awesome’ the current song

/songinfo – Display current song information

/removeme – Removes DJ from stage after current song [this allows a DJ

To my mind, this software is a tremendous step forward for tt.fm and COAK. It means that I can always access great classical music from the room, even if nobody else is there at the moment. I can also count on the room never (or at least rarely) being hijacked by trolls.

I don’t hang out in a lot of other turntable.fm rooms. If you are using this technology in yours, send us a comment on how it is working!

(Thanks to tt.fm/COAK user :elephant::dash:: for helping me with this article).

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About Matthew Lasar

Matthew Lasar is a co-founder of Radio Survivor and its business manager. He is the author of Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium (http://tinyurl.com/jr8uknk) and teaches history at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Likes: deejays, classical music, Disco, postpunk, cats, free school lunches. Dislikes: money, ideologies, claims that technology will fix everything. Follow him on twitter at @matthewlasar.